Britain's Fat Fight with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, part 3 review: a bathetic conclusion to this righteous campaign

Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall loves collaring a minister. Saving Africa’s Elephants: Hugh and the Ivory War memorably climaxed with him ambushing Andrea Leadsom, then the relevant minister. Jeremy Hunt must have seen that toe-curling footage and issued a code-red memo to all underlings at the Department of Health: on no account let that speccy irritant into my personal space.

In the concluding episode of Britain’s Fat Fight (BBC One), the hunt for Hunt intensified. Fearnley-Whittingstall even managed to steal up on him at the Conservative Party conference, causing the minister to back away as if from a suddenly detonated stink bomb. That was the closest the quarry came to capture, resulting in a slightly bathetic conclusion to this righteous campaign to confront the obesity epidemic.

Hunt’s elusiveness demonstrated the limits of direct action. Fearnley-Whittingstall (and Jamie Oliver, who had a cameo) can kick up an almighty fuss, and spearhead a shouty petition, but in the end they will have to rely on the slow, creeping impact of consciousness-raising.

The Fearnley-Whittingstall way is to talk good evidence-based horse sense. The ideas proposed both by him and the tiggerish neuroscientist Giles Yeo were simple, sensible and, in many cases, stealthy. A set of scales in GPs’ waiting rooms. Fewer holes in a chippy’s salt shaker.

There was no blaming or fat-shaming anyone. Rather than wag a finger (except at the stubborn resistance of the Department of Health), Fearnley-Whittingstall favoured the high five, the comforting arm. It worked with Janet, an obese single mother in Newcastle. Her father had just lost a leg to type-2 diabetes and his remaining foot looked gangrenously vulnerable too. Despite this dread warning, she couldn’t shake the weight. Suggesting a little me time, Fearnley-Whittingstall took her surfing. The boost to her morale was remarkable, and she promptly dropped several dress sizes.

Not every overweight person can be personally incentivised by a self-help guru from BBC One. But as that ungrammatical slogan has it, every little helps. The programme’s cogent argument is that state needs to do more. As the advertising eminence Sir John Hegarty put it, “The Government is not stepping up to the plate.” The problem is that everyone else is.